


Your Selective Memory

by goldleaf1066



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Descriptions of gore, First Time, Hair Pulling, Hair Washing, Hannibal POV, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Will Graham is a Tired Man, baths, with a rotator cuff issue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 03:47:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18792349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldleaf1066/pseuds/goldleaf1066
Summary: Will has a headache. Hannibal suggests an alternative method of curing it.





	Your Selective Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheFierceBeast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFierceBeast/gifts).



> This is set somewhere in early season-1-ish, but makes no specific references to anything.

“I was happy to get a cab,” Will says. “You didn’t have to do this.”

Hannibal can’t see him; he’s half-twisted, mid-reverse, but he knows Will’s face is tilted downward, a hand on each thigh.

“I wanted to,” Hannibal says, turning back and putting the car into drive. He negotiates the rest of the Quantico parking lot and is signalling at the first set of lights before Will speaks again.

“Thank you.” His fingers twitch against his knees, as if Will has only just remembered how people sit and is deciding how to arrange himself. Hannibal turns them left, accelerates. Will’s face is pointed now toward the passenger window, looking out and yet not looking. His reflection in the glass shows an empty expression, eyes hidden in shadow in between the glare of street and headlights; orange, white, red sliding across his features like oil on the surface of a puddle. Hannibal glances at the mirrored Will periodically, as much as safety will permit. It’s easy, now, to tell when Will sees nothing but the inside of his head. Submerged in thought, anxious, weary. Hannibal could watch Will tick over for hours.

He pays attention again to the road. “Do you have a headache?”

“Yeah,” Will says. In his peripheral Hannibal can see Will lift his hand to his forehead as if reacting to a prompt, changing his mind halfway there and instead pinching the bridge on his nose between thumb and forefinger beneath his glasses. “Hit hard in the middle of the last class; just pain, light and noise. Felt like I’d stepped in front of a train.” Hannibal can practically taste Will’s migraine in the confined space of the car. The air burbles with it, a soupy film enveloping them both, claggy and hot. 

When Hannibal had come across Will lifting the hood of his Volvo in the parking lot he’d already looked like hell. Colourless, as damp and insubstantial as petrol vapours. Curious that Will still hasn’t gone to a doctor over the thing eating his brain. Curious that maybe he’s not even noticed that stress alone shouldn’t core you like an apple, broken-down car or no. Hannibal thinks on this as he turns onto the I-95, bearing south-west.

“Thank you,” Will murmurs again, lifting his head to Hannibal the way he’s begun to do more often more recently. More than just eye-contact, less than longing. 

If Hannibal could he would reach out with his right hand, clasp Will’s left. Leave it and dig fingers into his lank, unbrushed hair. Drag him closer. Find out if he can see the rot in his mind through his eyes alone or whether he’ll need to lick it from the beads of sweat jewelling his throat.

Hannibal holds his gaze for as long as is sensible, before focusing on the road again.

It’s one hour and eighteen minutes before he makes the turn at last onto Trap Road. Will insists on paying the toll, scrounging up $3.25 in coins from his jacket pocket and passing them clammily to Hannibal.

They clatter down the toll booth chute, an unruly jangle of metal on metal. Will winces from the other side of the car.

*

Will’s home smells even worse than he does. Muddy, doggy, fishy. Homely. Will staggers in through the front door and Hannibal follows, not so much wary of the dogs but unwilling to befriend them. Then it occurs to him, as Will bangs about in the kitchen for aspirin, that having the pack on side is something that might prove prudent. He crouches and lets the collie-cross-something sniff the back of his hand. 

“Shit.” Will is leaning against the kitchen countertop, the heels of both palms as far into his eye-sockets as they will go.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any aspirin either,” Hannibal says, removing his coat and folding it over the back of an armchair. He watches Will’s chest rise and fall, timed with the pulses of his headache. “Where is your bathroom?”

Will lowers his hands and gestures toward a door on the far side of the living-space. “Through there, first on the left.”

“Thank you,” Hannibal says. He rises, intent on washing the dog drool deposited on his hand from a well-intentioned but unwelcome tongue. The collie trails him, nails clacking on the floorboards. 

“Pshh, hey!” Will says. The dog keeps staring at Hannibal, twitchy nose and half-cocked ears, but stops and sits obediently. 

Will’s bathroom is decently sized, a family washroom for a largeish house whose upper floors don’t see much use if the bed in the corner of Will’s living room is any indicator. There is a shower unit and a tub, the latter giving up a smear of dust on his fingertip when Hannibal runs it along its bottom. Gray tiles on the floor. Pale green floral ones from several decades since on the walls. He washes his hands, then turns to the bathtub and turns on the hot and cold faucets. No aspirin, but something else, perhaps.

“Hannibal?” Will’s voice is incredulous and distant: he’s still in the kitchen.

Hannibal pretends deafness; he wants Will to come to him, to see the look on his face and know if he’ll yield to this. No. He knows he will, either way, but the flavour of coercion he’s yet to decide. Something light that floats on the tongue, or something, richer, darker, headier.

Will’s footsteps are loud outside and the whine of a dog seeps under the door. Will knocks, three times, quietly. 

“What are you doing?” Will says, when Hannibal opens the bathroom door. The bath is filling up, steam rising and clouding the mirror above the sink and Will’s glasses. He takes them off, glances beyond Hannibal at the tub then back at him. De-spectacled Will’s gaze is a shade crosseyed and gives him a vulnerable mien despite his stance, hand on the jamb, both feet planted, shoulder-width apart and still-shod. Hannibal steps back, and Will’s eyes narrow slightly to keep him in focus.

“I’m running you a bath,” Hannibal says, and Will scowls. 

“I’m not _that_ blind.”

“Call it an alternative therapy.”

Will makes a dismissive noise. “Can’t scrub my mind, doctor.”

“I wouldn’t dare.’ He lifts a hand with digits splayed and continues before Will can cut in with how he feels about being asked how many fingers he’s holding up. Hannibal can see it poised on the riptide of Will’s tongue, a fast and easy discourtesy stitched so tightly through Will and certain to be Hannibal’s chosen unravelling. “However, you have four things in front of you.” He counts them off, folding fingers one by one. “A headache, no aspirin, a hot bath, and me.”

“I’m not going to unpick that.” Will moves over to the bath and turns off the faucets. They drip pizzicato notes into the depths below. “And I’m not submitting to this.” Running his hand through his hair, he softens a little: “However charitable your intentions.”

Hannibal leans against the sink, hands clasped. “You’ve lost time before. What if you lost some tonight?”

Will is cautious as he straightens. He puts his glasses carefully on the edge of the bath against the tiles. “I can’t do it on command,’ he says slowly, “I wouldn’t want to do it on command.”

“Understandable,” Hannibal says, looking at the bathtub. He can see his reflection, distorted and wobbling amongst the ripples on the surface. “What if you chose to forget?” 

Something is wending its way through Will’s thoughts; he’s almost got it. “What are you suggesting?”

“Taking a bath and washing your hair.”

“Who’s doing the washing?”

Hannibal raises his eyebrows. Will slumps then, a little, shoulders dropping, studying the 1970’s patterns on the wall. Will still looks like shit, still half-crumpled from the drive home, still malleable under a certain type of duress: consent by attrition.

“I’m dubious,” Will says, but he takes a step toward the bath to peer in.

“What are you expecting to see?”

“You tell me. It feels like you’re dropping hints into the water and expecting me to bob for them.”

“My intentions are entirely mundane.” Hannibal picks up his coat. “I’ll leave you, then, to enjoy the plunge.” Should he count to three? Hannibal’s hand reaches the door handle.

“Keep your clothes on.” Will’s arms are folded, his shirt semi-transparent over his ribs where he has dipped his fingers in the water before clasping himself there. “As if that makes this any less weird.”

“I had no intention of doing otherwise,” Hannibal says.

Will hovers. “When do we… when do I stop remembering?”

“Any time you like. You can continue to talk or do anything you would do normally. Imagine setting a stopwatch: you can start and stop it whenever you want, then reset everything to the way it was before.”

“Just pretend it didn’t happen?”

“If that will help.”

“I thought bottling things up was discouraged in your line of work.”

Hannibal smiles at him, this time with teeth. “I did say it was an unconventional method.”

Will’s eyes close. “Fine.” His breath falls out of him in a long push. “I feel like a wringing out might do me good.” He looks at the bathwater again, then at Hannibal. “Are you going to turn around or…?”

Hannibal opens the door. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Will lifts his hand to the topmost button of his shirt, rests it there against his sternum. “Okay.”

“Clock starts when the door closes.”

Hannibal crosses the threshold, his last view of the current version of Will Graham is of a man looking back at him and not seeing, not acting, not yet, not until the latch clicks and the timer starts. He waits until he can hear the susurration of undressing and the whip-crack of a pair of unworn pants being snapped taut then folded, before walking into Will’s living-space again. The collie has settled herself near the unlit fire and seems bored of the visitor now; not even her ears move at Hannibal’s reappearance. 

He counts the time by his wristwatch, then, like Will, knocks thrice.

*

Will is in the bath with his back to him, bare shoulders against the edge. His knees are a mountain peak drawn not quite to his chest, with arms mid-summit in a loop around his shins. He doesn’t turn his head, only the repeated worrying of his elbow with a forefinger is indication of any current discomfort. Hannibal intends to resolve that. 

“May I wash your back?” Hannibal says, taking off his blazer and rolling up his shirt sleeves. Will’s jaw makes a strange sideways movement before releasing. Hannibal pulls a towel from the rail and folds it to place beneath his knees on the floor. It’s not until he is situated behind Will, reaching for the bar of soap on the bath-ledge, that Will leans forward, exposing the planes of his back and the crenulations of his spine. Sparse freckles scattered like constellations. The puckered little kiss of a gunshot wound on his right shoulder-blade. 

“Does it bother you?” Hannibal gathers water into his hand and begins creating a lather.

“You bathing me?”

“Your shoulder.” Hannibal places his hand on it as he answers, and Will is a curious mass of heat beneath his palm despite the rigidness of his posture. Simmering, despite his best efforts to keep it from Hannibal.

Will rests his forehead on his knees as Hannibal sweeps the froth of soap across his skin. “Sometimes,” he says, voice tight, from the angle of his head or his headache or from what Hannibal is doing. Hannibal presses his fingertips into muscle very slightly. “I’m less flexible than I was.” He shudders then, and it takes him by surprise. His eyes are roving though Hannibal isn’t in his peripheral. “You bathing me doesn’t bother me either,” he adds, “which should probably bother me.”

“We’re friends.”

“Friends don’t tend to do this sort of thing.”

“I am also a doctor. Would you be more comfortable if you were to think of this in a purely therapeutic context?” He runs his hands across Will’s back now, from top to bottom, but not too low; sliding to his waist to rinse the soap from his fingers and back up again, pushing upwards over ribs and trapezius and the dorsal fin of the C1 vertebrae until he has both hands firmly rooted into Will’s hair. Will responds by dropping his head back until Hannibal is cradling it, his arms wilting from their knee-knot, drifting into the water beside him and floating a little there. He leans back and Hannibal can see all of him. Will’s upper incisors leave a fleeting impression on his bottom lip.

“I’d rather know it was you.” It’s the last thing Will says for a while. 

His skull is heavy, brimming with that mind and all of its potential. How tempting to crack it open like an egg and with two palms extract the contents. To push Will under until the water stops thrashing and the bubbles are slow and slipping sluglike from his lips and nostrils. 

Instead, Hannibal focuses on Will’s hair, that inoffensive tumult of nape-skating curls, dampening darkly from the steam, with such a vague notion of a style that Hannibal presumes Will must either cut it himself or sit like a plank of wood in a Wolf Trap barber’s chair avoiding eye-contact with himself in the mirror, asking for ‘the usual’. Hannibal winds a whorl around his index finger and tugs it. Will’s hair is thick and homespun, inherited like a handmade quilt. His late mother’s hair, Hannibal determines, long like the Mississippi river. Hannibal wonders, as he lifts a cupped hand of water to Will’s crown, if Will has ever tried knowing who she was through his father’s eyes. 

He tips his hand. Watches water pour from it and trickle though Will’s hair like mercury and down the back of his neck. 

Will’s breath steady and unending like waves against a shore. The way his nostrils widen with each pull.

There is shampoo in a bottle on the floor of the shower cubicle but retrieving it would break the spell. Instead, Hannibal turns the bar of soap over and over in his wetted-right hand, spinning a lather from it like yarn from a fleece. He lets the bar slide into the bathwater where it knocks against the bottom, resting on its edge between the side of the bath and Will’s thigh. He pushes his fingers into Will’s hair, leaving a wake of suds and tousled ringlets. There is a sustained almost-silence, like the pause before an accusation and the tongue-tied wordlessness after one, during which Hannibal washes Will’s hair calmly as Will comes to the boil underneath the spume. Hannibal rubs his fingertips against Will’s temples, across his forehead, wipes a crescent moon behind each ear. Hannibal can see all of Will: his drifting hands, the curling of his toes at the far end of the bath, knees not entirely unbent. 

Perhaps Will will feel his body betrays him. Perhaps not. It depends, Hannibal muses as he sluices Will’s scalp, on what Will chooses to remember. 

Hannibal will recall all of it. The sound of lapping water and increasingly laboured breathing. The tension in his hand as he curls a fistful of hair around his knuckles, before releasing, before clenching again. The cloying scent of the soap and the honeyed look in Will’s eyes as he tilts his face to peer at him upside down, the base of his skull balanced on the rim of the bathtub as Hannibal’s palms slide down to frame his cheeks and jaw. It wouldn’t take much effort to keep Will’s mouth shut. A little more upward pressure, just there. Or to make it open. A firmer hold, a few inches lower. To hear the change from arousal to panic: a more pertinent gasp. 

It intrigues Hannibal when Will’s hands emerge from the water with a deliberate sort of slowness to reach up to clasp at him, to paint wet handprints against his shoulders, neck, cheeks; whatever he can cling to from this backwards angle. Hannibal leans forward, above and over him. They are an awkward yin yang, spiralling languidly like bubbles on the surface of a too-deep lake. 

“I want to remember this,” Will says. “I want to want to.”

“I won’t stop you.”

A strange scramble. Will’s body arches, purchase gained with soles of feet almost beneath him. He’s pulling Hannibal down by his hair and it hurts. Wrong-way-round and nose-to-chin he hauls Hannibal’s face to his and kisses him. 

And kisses him again.

Hannibal still has a hold of Will’s head, keeps him there, lets Will’s tongue pour into his mouth, lets Will reel him in and scrape his teeth against his lip, lets his back ache and his shirt sleeves get soaked, lets Will have this breath from him, return it, steal it again.

Then his hands are on the edges of the bath and Will is looking up at him again from between them. From this topsy-turvy viewpoint Hannibal delights in the need in Will’s expression, the way his gaze tracks him as he starts to stand up and the ungainliness of his exit from the bath. Right-side up Will is bedraggled and wanton, volatile, becoming. Uncertain too in the twitch of his fingers and the pawprint-pitter-patter of water droplets falling off of him onto the tiles. Hannibal tosses the towel to him to give him something to do. When Hannibal begins to unbutton his vest Will’s eyes become saucers, his jaw a vise spun suddenly shut. 

Hannibal is stalked through the hallway, past the kitchen, to the lounge-cum-bedroom. He turns when he reaches the bed to see Will a few feet behind him, towel in one hand as if cocksure in his nakedness but in need of contingency should his mind catch up with him.

Hannibal reaches to him, and Will hands him the towel. Hannibal folds it and places it on the bedside table beside the alarm clock. 

Will, wavering, humid.

“Second thoughts?” Hannibal asks.

“Not finished having my first ones. So much for keeping your clothes on.” 

Hannibal has removed his shoes, unbuttoned everything, stands draped. “Don’t think,” he says, by the bed. “Don’t lose momentum.” He reaches out a hand to Will again. Will takes it, steps closer. His free hand lands on Hannibal’s shoulder and moves upward, dishevelling his opened collar and surging into his hair. It happens quickly. Hannibal is wholly interested in the way Will’s eyes meet his, and how he uses his grip to pull Hannibal’s head back as he presses his body flush to Hannibal’s. He feels Will’s leg move, his knee bending and the rise of his thigh as he negotiates them bodily onto the bed. His erection bluntly pushing into Hannibal’s hip. Urging Hannibal down, dislodging his hand from their clasp to join his other at the back of Hannibal’s head, practically scalping him as he closes in, heavy-eyed, fallen-jawed, kissing Hannibal again now so urgently neither of them can fill their lungs. 

All of a sudden so desperate. Time is striding onwards.

Hannibal gets his leg out from under Will, splays as far as his pants will allow. It’s impossible to get out of them with Will where he is but Will is so startlingly ardent in his attentions that Hannibal allows himself to push the thought of their getting soiled away, replacing it utterly with thoughts of Will Graham. 

Will, who may or may not choose to forget this. Will who cants his pelvis downward in a slow rut. 

“This is a bad idea,” Will says into his throat. His fingers are now busily working Hannibal’s shirt off of him, peeling him like a fruit. “Fucking my psychiatrist.”

“How does it make you feel?”

Will looks up at him, laughing strangely. “Bedside manner or pillow talk?” 

“Which would you prefer?” Hannibal asks. “Do you want to do this?”

“Yes,” Will gives up on the shirt, reaches down to unzip Hannibal’s fly. “Do you?”

Hannibal lifts his hips and Will hooks his fingers around his pants waistband, hauling them off and dropping them onto the floorboards. Bathwater, doghair. Hannibal blinks at him. “I was never officially your psychiatrist.”

Will is elbows and calves and dark hair on a ducked head, jawline, belly, groin glimpsed only sporadically. Hannibal watches Will as he dislodges him a little, half-sitting and removing his shirt at last. Sees the path of Will’s glances and files away the moment he notices that Hannibal is hard too. The change in Will is subtle, like the first day of winter. A sharpening in his focus. He wonders if Will has slept with men before, or whether the tremble in Will’s touch comes not from nerves but from disbelief that Hannibal wants him, too.

Hannibal is accustomed to fine things. Will is like a slab of _kobe_ beef, marbled through with black thoughts growing blacker with every migraine, each sleepless night. Hannibal wants to lay him on the _teppan_ and watch him cook. Feel him melt on his tongue, catch his ligaments between his teeth. Parcel him out in mouthfuls, eyes, heart and tongue. Will shifts until he is on his knees above him, shoulders back, looking down. His chest empties and refills, his face an expressive jumble as each instant passes over him, like some lost Vermeer uncovered and brought quivering into the light. Hannibal will hang this image of Will in the room he keeps for him in his mind. He is radiant and Hannibal desires him in the way he desires all beautiful things.

A tumble onto bedclothes, the pushback of a firm mattress. Hannibal was going to let Will run the show but his curiosity has gotten the better of him, and now Will is on his back looking up at him in a mirror of their positions a moment ago. A little rudeness, Hannibal concedes, has its place. Will is normally rude enough for the both of them. 

Hannibal removes his underwear and sees Will’s gaze meander downward and back up, the beginnings of a caught-in the-act smile in the corner of his mouth. Who knows if the dampness between them is bathwater or sweat? Who knows what will fly out of Will’s mouth when he reaches his zenith? 

Fingers and hands clamped around two skyward-tilted thighs. Hannibal regrets only that from this position Will’s face and whatever is sketched across it is hidden from him. He imagines then from the noises Will is making, the rush of half-words, panted incoherently and unchecked, that his head is thrown back, throat unguarded. Further south Will tastes of soap and body-heat; the latter less a sensation on the tongue than an experience Hannibal swallows down with satisfaction. 

Will is saying something now, made clearer only in his repetition of the request and his pulling at Hannibal’s hands where they grip his quadriceps. Hannibal clambers along Will’s body and when their pelvises meet Will bucks against him. Wild, growing wilder. Hannibal dismisses whatever Will is trying to say with a kiss, all violence and tenderness, all the things he can conjure to make Will want more than just this, afterwards.

Will curls around him, limbs knitted together around Hannibal’s shoulders and hips. Hannibal lifts his mouth from Wills only to lick his fore- and middle-fingers, hand snaking back down between them to push the digits, one, then two, into that part of Will’s body he’ll only have seen in a mirror.

Will’s orgasm is a silent rictus-jolt between Hannibal and the bed. Nothing stumbles from his lips after all.

*

There is a clatter as something hard falls onto something else just as unmalleable. Hannibal is lying on his back on the bed. He looks to his right to see Will’s hair and upper back disappear briefly over the side of the bed as he scrabbles for whatever it was he knocked off of the nightstand. 

Will untwists and half sits, towel in one hand, alarm clock with an open and empty battery compartment in the other. “I suppose that’s a sign,” he says, leaning over the edge of the bed again in a half-hearted and fruitless search for the double-As, dislodged in the fall and rolling out of sight.

“Time is only up if you want it to be,” says Hannibal. Will offers him the towel, and he takes it, cleaning himself. Will looks away. Hannibal is practical; Will is coming to his senses.

Possibly.

“I never much went in for the whole one-night-stand deal,” Will says. 

“Many don’t. Myself included.”

“What was this?”

“’A bad idea’, you said.”

Will looks at the clock, turning it over in his hands. “Afterwards it’s so clinical. Even this conversation is turning my stomach.” He puts the alarm clock back onto the bedside table. “I thought I might be right at least twice a day but maybe I was wrong.”

Hannibal has finished with the towel, putting it down between them. “You can still forget. That was the point of all of this.” 

“I thought this was a migraine cure. My head’s fine by the way.” Will turns to Hannibal. Hannibal smiles; if Will’s head was fine he would have been lambs’ brain soup weeks ago. “What if I don’t want to forget?”

“Then we can discuss this on Thursday, if you wish.”

“Cold,” Will says, and there is ice too in his tone. “I’d say ‘even for you’ but after your suggestion tonight I’m not sure you’re capable of surprising me anymore.”

 _You’d be surprised._ “Then tell me now, Will, why you don’t want to forget fucking your psychiatrist?”

He watches will bite down _We didn’t actually-_. Sees him work out the order of his next words. 

“I liked it,” Will says. Then, a shade bolder: “I want to do it again.” He swings his legs over the side of the bed, back to Hannibal now. “We can talk about _that_ on Thursday.”

Hannibal clambers off of the bed, stooping to gather his discarded clothes. They will need to be dry-cleaned, once home the car rid of canine-detritus with a thorough vacuuming. “I can let myself out,” he says. Will nods. The light from the kitchen or his short-sightedness is making him squint. Hannibal frees a hand from the bundle in his arms and runs it over Will’s cheek, his forehead, stroking back his hair. It’s not quite dry yet; the path of Hannibal’s fingers leaving furrows in that brown tangle.

“I was never officially your therapist,” Hannibal says again. 

“No,” says Will. “You weren’t.” 

Hannibal dresses and puts on his shoes, slips his arms into his coat, finds his car keys in his pocket. As he reverses away from Will’s house he can see within the silhouette of Will moving toward the kitchen, turning out the light.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be crack but went a bit weird (probably still crack though). Hannibal's POV is not something I find easy to write either!
> 
> Egregious comma/semicolon-misuse as always.


End file.
